A widely recognized problem in the field of storage and distribution of medications is the mismatch between the amount of doses prescribed and the amount of doses supplied in their conventional packages. In many cases, medications are packaged and supplied in boxes comprising a given number of doses, a number that often exceeds the number of doses that a patient should receive for a given treatment. The result is that frequently the remaining doses of said medication either expire unused in the patient's home, or are destroyed (in many occasions by means of methods not suitable, being an important focus of environmental pollution).
In order to solve this problem, already in the 1940s the idea to develop distribution systems of medicines in unit doses was approached in the United States, applied specifically to hospitals. These systems consist in a series of guidelines and methodologies to be followed in hospitals in order to optimize the use of medications, and are currently implemented in most hospitals. However, these systems continue to entail substantial workload for the hospital staff, who must manually prepare the corresponding doses for each patient based on the prescriptions issued by the doctor.
Recently, automatic systems for dispensing medicines in unit doses have began to be proposed. These systems generally consist in distribution cabinets, similar to beverage vending machines, in which medicines are previously stored and that are only accessible by authorized personnel. These systems allow alleviating the workload borne by the hospital pharmacy, as those dispensing cabinets are distributed in the different floors of the hospital. However, the system still relies mostly on the manual work of the person responsible of each floor, which can be a source of errors and delays.
Thus, there remains a need in the art for an automatic system for dispensing unit doses of medications that is fast and reliable, and that allows to substantially reduce the workload imposed on doctors, nurses and pharmacists in hospitals. Furthermore, there is also the need for a dispensing system of such kind that allows its adaptation to external pharmacies, allowing at least partially solving the current problem of adjusting the number of doses in current medication packages to the number of doses prescribed by the doctor for an outpatient.